Contact centers can provide numerous services to customers, and have been doing so for years. The idea of a contact center queue is not much different from that of standing in line at a bank and waiting to be helped by the next available teller. However, there can be a lot of frustration if the first, second, or even third teller cannot answer a given question or set of questions. The same frustrations have been known to occur in contact centers. A company can gain customer satisfaction if they are able to answer their customers' questions quickly and accurately.
Contact center technology, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
As products and problems become more complex and diverse in nature, a single agent often no longer has all of the skills or expertise to fully service customer contacts. To service customer contacts more effectively, the contact center increases training and has incorporated the use of dedicated Subject Matter Experts or SMEs, who are highly trained agents in a given aspect of a business. For example, contact centers that handle computer customer service may have application SMEs, hardware SMEs, operating system SMEs, network SMEs, etc. While SMEs are well qualified to answer questions on their particular subject(s), they are often unqualified to answer questions involving subjects outside of their respective specialties.
It is an objective of a contact center to provide the best possible service to each individual customer while constantly evaluating and addressing the needs of all contacting customers. This service can best be achieved by offering high-quality assistance from a qualified agent coupled with a minimal queue wait time for a customer. In order to facilitate a higher level of service, more qualified agents may be trained in various specialties.
Unfortunately, training agents in a large number of specialties takes valuable time and resources away from the contact center workflow and may negatively affect the level of immediately available customer service. Specifically, there are many specialties and work types in a typical contact center and training a multitude of agents in all of these specialties at once would be a difficult and time consuming task. Moreover, workflow demands may require a high-volume of attention in a particular specialty or work type at a given time period and once the demand is quelled, it may not repeat for some time. It is also very difficult to predict when such demands will present themselves.
To implement training where deemed necessary, contact centers utilize a series of surveys and agent scoring to identify poor performance and training needs. In many cases, this training occurs too long after an “event” has transpired. As a result, training and performance issues are identified too late, if at all. In the meantime, the agent has continued, and reinforced, the uncorrected behavior.
Thus, it is a long-felt need in contact center architecture to train agents in various specialties to meet the demands of a dynamically changing real-world contact flow.